Deriving the paradoxical effects of temporal metalepsis

Abstract

This paper explores a phenomenon, metalepsis, that hasn’t been discussed in linguistics until only recently, but is important because it sheds new light on the semantics of fiction and paradoxical statements. We focus on a particular instance of metalepsis, namely the following sentence from Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval: ‘While the coach is making its way up to the hills, let us piece together the memories of the days when I often visited these parts.’ This sentence exemplifies a temporal paradox since the narrator asks the narratee to join him in doing something that had already happened. Previous analyses of metalepsis have focused on third-person examples, leading to incorrect predictions for such first-person examples. We propose a novel analysis that accounts for both first- and third-person uses, while also accounting for a potential difference in aesthetic import between the two cases.